Film About George Reeves, TV Superman

I'm put-off by those essayist who would write sentences as paragraphs and having graded papers in English Comp, that one would get a "D."


Here's Anthony Lane in The New Yorker

SUPERMEN
"Hollywoodland" and the films of Kenji Mizoguchi.
by ANTHONY LANE
Issue of 2006-09-11
Posted 2006-09-04


What will be our lasting image of Superman, in a year that marked his return? Will it be Brandon Routh, jutting his jaw at a world that craves salvation? Or will it be Ben Affleck, falling like a sack of sugar beets onto a concrete floor, his airborne glide cut short by the snap of a wire harness? The latter, surely the more involving spectacle, comes from "Hollywoodland," the début of the director Allen Coulter. Written by Paul Bernbaum, it stars Affleck as George Reeves, the man whose wide smile and matching shoulders won him the love of a youthful public in the nineteen-fifties, when he played the Man of Steel on TV.

We see but a single clip from the credits of that show, yet the smell of television hangs around the movie like cigar smoke. It is there in a screening of "From Here to Eternity," when people start to laugh at Reeves?-who shares a scene with Burt Lancaster?-because they recognize him from the small screen and can't help thinking of his cape and tights. Listen, likewise, to the worried Edgar Mannix (Bob Hoskins), of M-G-M, presiding over his fiefdom like a superannuated Mussolini: "fags and television," he says, listing the threats to his supremacy. His marriage is no less frail, as he and his wife, Toni (Diane Lane), each take a lover with the other's consent; Edgar has a Japanese girl who speaks no English, while Toni meets the swaggering Reeves at a restaurant. The scene is a joy: jewels, long gloves, Rita Hayworth at a nearby table, and shoes removed to walk across a strip of sand and park yourself on a bench under lamplight. George and Toni go to bed that night, without ado, and only in the morning does he realize whose wife she is. As for Toni, her need for love is infinite but bounded: "I have another seven good years before my ass drops like a duffelbag."

That slice of the movie is interleaved with a second, culled from 1959, when Reeves is found with a bullet through his brain. The police call it suicide, but Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a private detective, suspects foul play. Various suggestions rise like vapors in his mind: an angry spat, perhaps, between George and Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), the minx to whom he was latterly engaged; a vengeful Toni, thrown over for the younger woman; or even Edgar, hiring hoods to act on her dismay. In fact, the official verdict on Reeves's death stands to this day, and Coulter's film is content to let the mystery (if it is a mystery) float onward unresolved. Although many viewers will emerge dissatisfied, the bathos with which "Hollywoodland" drifts to a close struck me as true to the times?-to a sense of the fifties, so verdant in the early scenes, winding up as a burnt-out case, with Simo pacing a city the color of scorched grass. We switch from the dazzle of Diane Lane in a full-skirted dress, with polka dots of alternating red and blue, to Adrien Brody in a shirt about as dazzling as a tobacco stain.

If only he were right for the role. Nobody else could have mustered his skeletal saintliness in "The Pianist," but who really believes he would last a week as a private eye? A rival dick gives Simo the once-over and remarks, "Nobody told him the world don't need two Ralph Meekers." A nice line, spoiled only by the fact that Brody looks as much like Meeker as he does like Whoopi Goldberg. Surely Simo needs muscle and a dab of meanness (as shown by Meeker, playing a solid, brutish Mike Hammer in "Kiss Me Deadly"), whereas all we get is the nervous hopes of a rube, and we soon grow bored with his sleuthing, keen to flip back to the living Reeves and his tanglings with Toni?-in other words, to Affleck and Lane. I have rarely warmed to Affleck, except for his bastard turn in "Boiler Room," but here he delivers a lovely study of a star, both shooting and falling: tall, dark, handsome, but wise to the fate of all vanity, and, though hardly whip-smart, by no means dumb enough to be happy with his lot. For every Burt Lancaster, there have been thousands of George Reeveses, and Affleck pays them the kind of fond homage?-an offer of limelight?-that they otherwise never get. In the words of Reeves's genial agent (Jeffrey DeMunn), "An actor can't always act?-sometimes he has to work."

To be honest, I could have used a whole film about Toni Mannix. To learn, as I did later, that she was once a Ziegfeld girl came as no surprise; you can sense it in her patter and her drive. Thanks to Lane, "Hollywoodland," no great shakes as a thriller, becomes a quiet horror story about the monstrosity of time. Actresses often lament, with justice, the drying up of roles for older women; Lane goes one better and makes that desiccation the subject of the drama?-just wait for the final shot of her, lined and lovesick, turning back in weariness to her husband's hug. To be not merely beautiful but alive to the fact of beauty's slow fade, and to seem more beautiful because of such terrible knowledge: that is a gift most actors would prefer not to possess, but Lane has it, and she turns Toni's grab at love from a foolish fancy into a kind of tragic prayer. As she says to George, "Nobody ever asked to be happy later." That may be the motto of "Hollywoodland," but, in its yearning for the blaze of the immediate?-for present laughter, for the return of Superman, for apocalypse right now?-it is also the story of Hollywood.



The Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi died fifty years ago, on August 24, 1956. In his honor, Film Forum has organized a short festival, starting September 8th, comprising half a dozen films. Should you enjoy those, you will have a mere eighty-four movies to go?-an unfeasible task, given that many of them are silent, untraceable quickies from the nineteen-twenties. Nevertheless, the handful of films in the series, ranging from "Sisters of the Gion" (1936) to "Street of Shame" (1956), and including a six-day run of the celebrated "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953), should be enough to back Jean-Luc Godard's claim that Mizoguchi was, "quite simply, one of the greatest of filmmakers." If you know the name already, that assessment will seem uncontentious; for many moviegoers?-those familiar with Akira Kurosawa, perhaps, and eager to place "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai" at the summit of Japanese cinema?-the more likely response will be "Who?"

There are certainly fertile comparisons to be made between Kurosawa and Mizoguchi; and yet, to those who love the latter, there is no comparison. Kurosawa seems sweaty and overwrought beside the astounding formal finesse of a movie like "Sansho the Bailiff " (1954). I have seen "Sansho" only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal. The film itself is a tale of broken men and women, or of those bent to the breaking point by the harrying furies of society. Kurosawa may have fashioned the thrilling "Throne of Blood" from the plot of "Macbeth," but Mizoguchi, though he adapted none of the plays, remains the more profound Shakespearean, such are the reversals and accelerations of fortune into which his characters are swept.

"Sansho" revolves around the widow and children of a provincial governor, all of them reduced to servitude and worse; the burden of resilience lies with the mother and daughter, and, indeed, it is hard to think of a Mizoguchi plot that does not flow from a female source. In the course of his inquiries into suffering, a woman is invariably both the star witness and the most enduring victim. "The Life of Oharu" (1952) traces the decline of its seventeenth-century heroine from a well-bred servant of the court to an aged prostitute, begging for alms under a sky of tarnished silver. Her crime is to be a slave to her own passions, not to the various men who control her by law. Mizoguchi himself was a womanizer and an avowed frequenter of brothels, and his wife succumbed to mental illness; what manner of guilt or expiation might have lain beneath his intensely sympathetic direction of actresses we can only guess.

Despite Mizoguchi's pleas for justice, his films could not be farther from tirades. They offer serenity to the point of hallucination, and even their scuffles of violence are like controlled explosions, held in by the composure of the frame. When Oharu learns that a lover has died, she attempts to follow suit, grabbing a knife and trying to stab herself. Her mother rushes to stop her, and the two women take their struggle from the family house to the adjacent wood. And what do we recall of the scene? Not the jab of the blade but the peaceful, sideways motion of the camera, and the way that it stays with them after they have come gaspingly to rest, as if it were breathing in the airy flickers of sunlight on the spearlike shafts of bamboo and so reassuring us that, somehow, all shall be well. If you have never witnessed the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, or understood how a single tracking shot can feel like a declaration of faith, here is your chance. Mizoguchi's work may brim with the fears of a fatalist, yet it also gleams with unexpected hope.

This looks to be one I will get on DVD for sure.

Alan Coulter has directed several "The Sopranos," a "Six Feet Under," "Rome," and other TV series. This is his first feature film. It's one I will make it to the multiplex to see as well as "The Black Dahlia" (well, depending on the reviews) as both are great nostalgia for me, having lived in Hollywood when I was young. I heard all the rumors about Reeve's death and from what I have read about the movie, it sticks pretty close to the true story, even though it is still and unsolved mystery.

I wonder how many Hollywood deaths have that "unsolved" aura about them? Seems like there are more than a few.

It's a town that enthralls one in the fantasric life and repels one in its rather pedestrian decadence. There is a sublimity that is unmistaken but one can hardly help themselves getting involved with the glamour and the transgressions. Many have and many have paid for it, one way or another. I got outta there.

I briefly lived near Hollywood for a short time. Didn't fit with the life style. My first impression of Hollywood and Vine:
????That's it?!!!!!!!!!

Hollywood and Vine in the 20's through the 60's was a centerpoint of Hollywood itself with Grauman's Chinese the marker. It's radically changed in over 40 years.